The 36 Most Anticipated Books of 2026

Books ahoy! The new year promises adventures, escapes, and mind-bending delights for bibliophiles of all stripes. For fiction lovers, there’s George Saunders’ wild ride of a second novel, Ann Patchett’s dissection of an American family, the conclusion to Colson Whitehead’s riveting Harlem trilogy, Douglas Stuart’s queer epic, and Xochitl Gonzalez’s love letter to a vanished Brooklyn. There are gorgeous story collections, as well: Louise Erdrich’s mystical musings, Rachel Khong’s loopy dramas, and Ruth Ozeki’s meditations on the highs and lows of the writing life. Thrillers, too, loom on the horizon: mega best-seller Colleen Hoover’s journey through the dark corners of the internet, Tana French’s atmospheric mystery set in an Irish town, and Robinne Lee’s Hollywood noir.

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Nonfiction to come in the new year ranges across thought-provoking topics, among them Heather Ann Thompson’s look back at an infamous crime of the 1980s, Michael Pollan’s deep dive into the science of consciousness, a saga of Syrian resistance from Anand Gopal, and Namwali Serpell’s breathtaking survey of Toni Morrison’s oeuvre.

Here, the 36 most anticipated books of 2026. 

Woman Down, Colleen Hoover (Jan. 13)

The genre doyenne is back with a thriller that pits Petra Rose, a best-selling writer and muse of book clubs and internet discourse, against an unforced career error, with podcasters and influencers circling like vultures. Desperate to revive her creative self, she retreats to a cabin, where she strikes up a research relationship with Nathaniel Saint, a cop whose sexy swagger mirrors that of a character in Petra’s new manuscript. Amid a maze of mystery and erotic charge, she fights for her future.

Vigil, George Saunders (Jan. 27)

Climate change meets the afterlife in George Saunders’ seductive second novel, a companion piece to the Booker Prize-winning Lincoln in the Bardo. Here, Saunders evokes another bardo as Jill “Doll” Blaine, a young woman who perished in a freakish bombing incident, performs her ghostly duty of ushering another soul across the threshold of mortality—except K. J. Boone, a Texan oilman, balks on his deathbed, refusing redemption. Saunders tucks stories within stories, his prose rich with daring experimentation and his trademark compassion.

Fear and Fury, Heather Ann Thompson (Jan. 27)

Embraced by the media after he shot four Black teenagers on the New York City subway, Bernie Goetz was the vigilante poster boy of the 1980s, a folk hero to millions, celebrated for fighting back against so-called criminals accused of shredding the nation’s social fabric. Heather Ann Thompson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water, spins this narrative on its head, centering Goetz’s victims while illuminating the rise of tabloid journalism and early stirrings of disinformation culture. 

Autobiography of Cotton, Cristina Rivera Garza (Feb. 3)

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Liliana’s Invincible Summer takes inspiration from her grandparents’ experiences laboring in the Mexican cotton fields just across the Rio Grande from Texas. Autobiography of Cotton, translated by Christina MacSweeney, is a sumptuous work of autofiction that plumbs the mirage-like landscapes of the border region and the frictions that simmer between neighboring nations. In dense, lyrical prose, Rivera Garza weaves in an array of political and historical allusions, highlighting the human costs and environmental degradation caused by the cash crop that created our modern world.

This Is Not About Us, Allegra Goodman (Feb. 10)

Meet the Rubinsteins: a Boston family that thrives on affection, conflict, and apple cake. In this vibrant collection of linked stories, some previously published in the New Yorker, Allegra Goodman dissects the foibles and fantasies of her cast, from the three founding sisters to their offspring and offspring’s offspring. These generations smile and sulk, bully and banter, lust and love, as Goodman interrogates the lives of her women: “Mothering. Caregiving. It sucked resistance out of you.”

So Old, So Young, Grant Ginder (Feb. 17)

College friends are friends for life, or so goes the aphorism tested in Grant Ginder’s poignant tragicomedy about six Penn alums and the lavish reunions they stage over two decades. The friends orbit in and out of New York City, catching up on hookups and breakups, marriages and births, careers and consultancies, their bright young lives slipping into a slow, disillusioned tread toward adulthood. There’s a whiff of F. Scott Fitzgerald here, as Ginder coolly takes a scalpel to his carefree cast, exposing the ways in which aging reveals our authentic, flawed selves.

On Morrison, Namwali Serpell (Feb. 17)

Harvard English professor Namwali Serpell recreates the course she teaches on Toni Morrison through close readings of the Nobel laureate’s virtuosic, often elliptical fiction. Serpell weighs Tar Baby’s “slippery, sticky black aesthetic” and declares the alliteration in Jazz among the author’s “most gorgeous prose.” Beloved withholds as much as it gives on the page, reflecting a “deep ambivalence about revelation.” In this lavish yet clear-eyed study, Serpell shows how Morrison breathed new life into the novel. This is literary criticism at its finest.

Brawler, Lauren Groff (Feb. 24)

A cluster of childhood friends gathers around a dying woman. A sick girl attempts to make sense of her reality. An abused wife shepherds her children out of harm’s way. In nine stories, the versatile Lauren Groff toggles between timelines and landscapes, from California to New England to Florida, contemplating her characters through spare sentences and a realism tinged with alluring mystery. She excavates the interior lives and resilience of her protagonists as they stare down dangers lurking amid salt marshes and ice-crusted meadows.

Kin, Tayari Jones (Feb. 24)

Two young Black women, Vernice and Annie, neighbors and friends who grew up without their mothers in rural Honeysuckle, La., find themselves on diverging life paths. One heads to Atlanta’s prestigious, network-savvy Spelman College, while the other seeks answers about the parent who abandoned her. Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage, conjures the textures and history of the American South, telling a story of braided lives marked by “gardenia soap, sugary liqueur, and just a whiff of the sweat that comes from constant motion.”

A World Appears, Michael Pollan (Feb. 24)

A wager between two neuroscientists in a German bar in 1998 launched a quest for a biological grail: the mechanics of consciousness, also known as the “hard problem.” Now one of our most popular science writers bores deep into the layers of sentience, leaving no synapse unfired. From lab researchers to philosophers to botanists (can plants think?), he interrogates a diverse cast of thinkers and explores their many theories, navigating a funhouse of weirdness and wonder.

The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts, Kim Fu (March 3)

There’s a tingle of Poltergeist déjà vu in Kim Fu’s disquieting novel about one woman’s purchase in a half-built, haunted development. Still reeling from the death of her mother, therapist Eleanor Fan invests her inheritance to become the first resident of a new neighborhood in Bering Rock, a western town with a peculiar past, imagining herself “a kind of leader, den mother, witch.” With the onset of torrential rains, accompanied by nightmares, Eleanor must confront the thinning membrane of reality. 

Days of Love and Rage, Anand Gopal (March 3)

Manbij, Syria, 2011: intoxicated by democratic ideals, a cadre of activists hatch a scheme to undermine an oppressive regime. The government springs into action, mounting checkpoints, conducting body searches, and disappearing its own citizens. A finalist for a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, Anand Gopal distills scores of interviews and original research into a sweeping tour de force of investigative journalism, reminiscent of Jonathan Blitzer’s Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here.

Python’s Kiss, Louise Erdrich (March 24)

A girl’s brush with a python’s tongue bestows the power to discern adult motivations. A young woman carries a stone plucked from the shore of Lake Superior, both talisman and a kind of soulmate. A murder on the frontier kindles a reckoning with morality and Manifest Destiny. In a stunning collection of 13 stories, Louise Erdrich, winner of both a Pulitzer and a National Book Award, injects jarring, transformative moments into otherwise ordinary lives. The book is enhanced by original art from the author’s daughter, Aza Erdrich Abe.

The Keeper, Tana French (March 31)

In a mesmerizing conclusion to the best-selling Cal Hooper trilogy, Tana French returns to the Irish “townland” of Ardnakelty, recounting crimes and misdemeanors that haunt the retired Chicago detective, his fiancé Lena, and their adopted child. After a young woman engaged to the son of a local power broker reportedly dies by suicide, Cal questions her tragic death, unraveling a conspiracy while yearning to uphold his mission to protect the innocent, who “pick their way” through the world “like nervous deer, ready to leap at any startle.”

London Falling, Patrick Radden Keefe (April 7)

The New Yorker journalist and author of Say Nothing brings his capacious literary toolbox to a true-life tale that opens with the apparent suicide, in 2019, of 19-year-old Zac Brettler, who was seen on MI6 surveillance cameras leaping off a balcony overlooking the Thames River. The young man, it was later revealed, had passed himself off as the son of a Russian oligarch, his ruse the tip of an iceberg of corruption. Patrick Radden Keefe’s stylish, suspenseful prose shines a light onto the seedy underworld beneath an international capital.

My Dear You, Rachel Khong (April 7)

An alligator mauls a tourist in Australia, and she wakes up in a heaven built for “smoking hot” 33-year-olds. A swimming instructor strokes through currents of online dating. Post-miscarriage, a distraught American woman flees to Portugal, where she indulges in a pair of red sandals and an affair with a married man. In 10 beguiling stories, the author of Real Americans probes dread and desire, marriage and motherhood; she confidently kneads and molds the short-story form, stretching it like taffy.

American Fantasy, Emma Straub (April 7)

Emma Straub, the best-selling queen of sunny vibes, brings the right stuff to a four-day Caribbean cruise as Annie, her divorced, disillusioned protagonist, joins thousands of 50-something women and an aging boy band from the ‘90s. These mega-fans croon old hits, sip drinks on the lido deck, and bask in the tropical sun, deferring midlife crises over a long weekend of spicy adventure. Annie moves step by step toward a new romance, bidding bye, bye, bye to the past.

Yesteryear, Caro Claire Burke (April 7)

In podcaster Caro Claire Burke’s enthralling debut, Natalie, Burke’s narrator, embodies a “traditional” woman’s can-do lifestyle—complete with a virile, cowboy husband, farm-fresh meals, and six winsome children—encouraging a social media audience of millions to embrace conservative values. Except her kitchen’s a set, a produced mirage to tee up her family’s political pursuits. When she wakes up one morning in 1855—with the same spouse, same children, and same house, but in a version of reality that’s utterly transformed, utterly alien—she’s forced to grapple with the false morality she’s packaged.

Go Gentle, Maria Semple (April 14)

Adora Hazzard, a divorced Stoic philosopher, has achieved the good life. She’s content with her life with her daughter in an Ansonia apartment on the Upper West Side of New York City, where she serves as a moral tutor to affluent 11-year-olds and is embedded in a “coven” of charismatic, like-minded women. Hijinks ensue when Adora meets a dashing man at the ballet, and her Utopia threatens to crumble. The best-selling author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette blends the sensual with the sinister in a romp through the museums and maisonettes of genteel Manhattan.

Last Night in Brooklyn, Xochitl Gonzalez (April 21)

In the aughts, Fort Greene was Brooklyn’s “It” neighborhood, teeming with inventive chefs, multicultural musicians, a late-night bar scene, and the creep of gentrification. Xochitl Gonzalez, the author of Olga Dies Dreaming, invokes the creative ferment in Fort Greene during the run-up to Barack Obama’s election. Alicia Canales rejects her family’s bourgeois expectations, drawing closer to La Garza, a pink-draped diva whose outer-borough glamour is pure street—while unknowingly toasting the end of an era as bankers move in like sharks.

The Things We Never Say, Elizabeth Strout (May 5)

In the fall of 2024, 57-year-old Artie “Damn-Dam” Dam, a beloved Massachusetts high-school teacher, grapples with a sudden crisis. By all appearances he lives a tranquil life with his wife, the opinionated Evie, both close to their adult son. But inwardly he’s a suicidal mess. A brush with death sparks an investigation into his own potential superpower. The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist unveils a fresh setting and troupe of characters that lifts her literary game with energized prose and gimlet-eyed insights.

John of John, Douglas Stuart (May 5)

John-Calum “Cal” Macleod leaves behind a life of couch-surfing and food thievery in Edinburgh and heads home to the Isle of Harris, grappling with his closeted sexuality and his father’s religious absolutism, his potty-mouthed grandmother filling an emotional void. Back in familiar surroundings, Cal confronts new secrets and a lover’s eyes, “the dull, watery green alive with a thousand flecks of gold.” Douglas Stuart, winner of the Booker prize for his debut novel, Shuggie Bain, beautifully evokes the urgency and despair of a quotidian life.

One Leg on Earth, ‘Pemi Aguda (May 5)

Yosoye, an apprentice at a Lagos architectural firm, relishes her shabby studio apartment and independence from her mother, immersing herself in an urban project that hails a bold, forward-looking Nigeria. But a deadly psychological phenomenon infects the city: pregnant women are drowning themselves in its bays and lagoons. When Yosoye herself becomes pregnant, she senses an invisible menace. ‘Pemi Aguda, a finalist for the National Book Award, deftly entwines the anxieties of parenting with speculative elements, setting her story in a nation still stained by colonialism.

On Witness and Respair, Jesmyn Ward (May 19)

The two-time National Book Award winner gathers previously published essays with new pieces on topics from fiction to cinema, examining figures real and imagined, such as the actor Regina King, the literary icon Jay Gatsby, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, and characters in director Ava DuVernay’s films. From celebrity profiles to DNA test results to a tender meditation on parenting a Black son, Jesmyn Ward moves nimbly among people and themes.

Babylon, South Dakota, Tom Lin (May 26)

The burdens of assimilation weigh heavily on the shoulders of Saul Keng Hsui and Mei Lee, Chinese immigrants farming chrysanthemums on an American prairie. They raise a daughter and learn English, “this new language round and slippery on their tongues like bites of plum.”All’s well until the U.S. Army of Engineers builds a nearby missile silo, bringing miraculous and dangerous powers to the family and their land.

The Typing Lady, Ruth Ozeki (June 2)

A dead Beat poet possesses the mind of a Manhattan book editor. An elderly Asian writer’s autofiction opens and opens, like Russian nesting dolls. A childhood infatuation plays out against a backdrop of department politics at Yale. “Vampirish” relationships feed off each other, bound by a shared passion for literature. In 11 stories, the acclaimed Ruth Ozeki moves gracefully among characters, between decades and locales, skewering power dynamics in academia and the writer’s craft—“collaborations between people who read and people who type”—with mordant wit.

Whistler, Ann Patchett (June 2)

The literary force of nature also known as Ann Patchett is back with a vibrant novel that turns on a surprise encounter at New York’s Metropolitan Museum. Middle-aged Daphne and her husband Jonathan are canvassing galleries when they notice a stalker: Eddie Triplett, an elderly gentleman who’d briefly been Daphne’s stepfather when she was a child. She hasn’t seen Eddie in over four decades, but a deferred intimacy bridges the years. Families are amalgams of histories, personalities, and circumstances—and Patchett has earned a reputation for expertly dissecting familial angst.

Villa Coco, Andrew Sean Greer (June 9)

Amid career woes and failed romances, a 21-year-old gay American archivist lands a job as an assistant to the imperious 92-year-old Baronessa Coco, helping to catalog her vast art collection in her Tuscan villa. Here he meets blowzy aristocrats, boar hunters, and a married Italian who catches his fancy. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the Arthur Less novels captures the allure of la dolce vita—Renaissance paintings and books, bottles of Lambrusco wine and gelato—all bathed in a buttery Tuscan light.

The Shampoo Effect, Jenny Jackson (June 30)

The best-selling author of Pineapple Street returns with a dramedy of manners set in coastal Greenhead, Mass., a postcard-picture community surrounded by “yellow marshes, old lobster boats, and a vast white sand beach.” Twenty-eight-year-old Caroline Lash blasts into town with writerly ambitions and falls in with a bohemian kayaker and his hometown crew, including an ex-girlfriend who’s pregnant with his baby. Jenny Jackson moves her characters in and out of situationships with the confidence of a chess master, recalling the work of Elin Hilderbrand.

A Real Animal, Emeline Atwood (July 7)

In the aftermath of a sexual assault, Lucy steps from college into a life thrumming with radical choices and visceral feeling, kindling a connection with the natural world: leopards, cockatoos, bats, and fish. Plagued by career questions and pulled into an all-consuming relationship with a violent older man, she finds relief in scuba diving and undersea marvels. Emeline Atwood’s debut novel stirs with edgy sex, anger, and transcendence.

Crash Into Me, Robinne Lee (July 7)

An aspiring photographer, Cecilia Chen has moved with her husband, a French director, and their children from Paris to Los Angeles: she has plans for gallery representation, and he’s set to make films for a major studio. But a car crash opens up a Pandora’s box of memories and secrets; the other woman in the accident, Farouk, is a former model and acquaintance whose magnetism ensnares Cecilia. Actor and author Robinne Lee, who wrote The Idea of You, delivers erotic suspense as glittery and sensuous as Tinsel Town itself.

Cool Machine, Colson Whitehead (July 21)

Colson Whitehead, one of America’s most celebrated novelists, concludes his Harlem-set trilogy with protagonist Ray Carney and his family facing down fresh threats in a New York City transfigured by the whiplash of Ronald Reagan’s conservatism. Throughout the 1980s, Ray and his partner in crime, Pepper, juggle heists and bourgeois aspirations, feeling the shiv of racism pressed against their fates. From rejuvenated uptown blocks to the East Village’s high-octane art scene, Whitehead offers an ode to a majestic city and its diverse people.

Etna, Paul Yoon (Aug. 4)

In Paul Yoon’s spare, hypnotic novel, canine protagonist Etna narrates his odyssey from trained combat dog to a life beyond the savagery of war, wending through conflicts to his puppyhood home: Does it still exist? He encounters a range of people and animals—some suspect, some trustworthy—including a network of other dogs who lick his wounds and offer sage advice. In the tradition of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Yoon’s parable limns the politics of destruction and the emotional wisdom of man’s best friend.

The Occidental Book of the Dead, T. Geronimo Johnson (Sept. 15)

In T. Geronimo Johnson’s Atlanta, racial tensions percolate and the system rarely bends to demands for justice. In his latest novel, the author of Welcome to Braggsville, a National Book Award finalist, explores the moral calculus of a Black cop who’s implicated in the killing of a white teenager. In a narrative that unfolds over two decades, Johnson asks big questions about identity, corruption, and American ideals.

The Radiance, Ayad Akhtar (Sept. 29)

In the wake of a near-fatal bicycle accident, a writer notices a “butterscotch glow” that permeates his senses: he can even hear it. He tries to pinpoint the sensation within his intellectual matrix, probing everything from Dostoevsky to the Quran to the #MeToo reckoning. “Neurologic anomaly legitimizes the uncanny,” he asserts, until it upends beliefs about family, desire, and free will. Ayad Akhtar, the author of Homeland Elegies, plaits autofiction with philosophical inquiry.

American Hagwon, Min Jin Lee (Sept. 29)

Once comfortably middle class in Korea, John and Helen Koh and their three children find their lives upended by a shocking betrayal and Asia’s IMF Crisis, launching an odyssey to Sydney and then Southern California, navigating fresh challenges and driven by faith that education will open the door to success and security. The best-selling author of Pachinko, a National Book Award finalist, Min Jin Lee has crafted another epic where the ties of family twist and fray but rarely part.